A Proposal for Deterrence

As his troops suffer battlefield defeats, poor morale and disarray, and as his critics in Russia have suffered a sudden outbreak of falling out of windows, heart attacks and other unfortunate accidents, Vladimir Putin has not-so-subtly threatened to resort to nuclear weapons to salvage some semblance of victory from his ill-conceived invasion of Ukraine.

Determining what would deter a desperate Mr. Putin is a difficult undertaking, but a retired Navy captain named Jerry Hendrix offers a persuasive proposal at National Review.

He argues that any effective deterrence requires the threat of the use of force and that it must be made unequivocally clear to Mr. Putin that,

The West should respond together in a clear NATO declaration: Any introduction of nuclear weapons, or for that matter any weapons of mass destruction, on the European plain will result in a full response from the alliance. NATO aircraft will not just establish a no-fly zone, but rather instantly come to the aid of Ukrainian forces and go on the offensive against Russia.

NATO ships will quickly move to sink any Russian ships at Ukrainian ports or operating in the Black or Baltic Seas. Likewise, it will blockade any ships in Russian ports.

Meanwhile, NATO troops, who have been quietly pre-positioned in the east over the past seven months, will enter Ukraine.

Lastly, key Russian military positions — including command-and-control nodes, fuel dumps, and ammunition depots that sit on the Russian side of the Ukrainian border — will be eliminated.

Only by being this stark can we hope to deter a panicked man at the end of his rope.

It must be made “clearer than truth” — as the great Democrat secretary of state Dean Acheson said at the beginning of the Cold War — to those near and around Putin, that should they choose wholesale war, what follows automatically will be upon their heads.

The big question is whether Mr. Biden would have the kidney for such measures and, if so, whether Congress would endorse them.